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June 20, 2007
Not a good way to go
I hope if I get dug up 500 years from now, scientists are interested in me for a reason other than being the oldest-known gunshot victim:
The musket blast was sudden and deadly, the killing nearly 500 years ago of what may have been the first gunshot victim in the Western Hemisphere.
"We didn't expect it. We saw this skull and saw the almost round hole and thought people must have been shooting around here recently," said Guillermo Cock, an archaeologist who found the remains near Lima, Peru.
But he realized that the skull was ancient, and a recent bullet strike would simply have shattered it, Cock said in a telephone interview.
The skull was found among a large group of bones of ancient Incas, who had died violently in the early 1500s as the Spanish Conquistadors battled the native empire.
The bones were in shallow graves, leading the archaeologist to speculate the burials were done hurriedly during conflict, perhaps an uprising against the Spanish in 1536.
To be sure this was a gunshot wound — making it the earliest one documented in the Americas — the skull was studied by forensics expert Tim Palmbach at the University of New Haven, who brought in other experts.
Al Harper, director of the Henry C. Lee Institute of Forensic Science in New Haven, Conn., said the team "tried to rule out all kinds of causes of the hole — a rock from a slingshot, spear, sledgehammer." Harper and Palmbach studied the skull with a powerful scanning electronic microscope.
entry no. 886
Posted by oz115 at June 20, 2007 02:57 PM